Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

It was no use praying, no use beseeching him to spare me, if only for a minute; I supplicated in vain. He remained where he was, silent and disconcerted, so real that I could have touched him had I stretched out my hand.

A week passed, things grew more and more intense, and my inner turmoil, a compound of weakness and dread, steadily increased. I felt myself slipping deeper and deeper into depression. I wanted to die.

I went to see Sayed and informed him of my desire to get it over with. I volunteered for a suicide attack. It was the most conclusive of shortcuts, and the most worthwhile, as well. This idea, on my mind since well before the mistake that had led to the Corporal’s execution, had by now become my fixation. I wasn’t afraid. I had no attachment to anything anymore. I felt as qualified as any suicide bomber. Every morning, you could hear them exploding on the streets; every evening, some military post was attacked. The bombers went to their deaths as to a party, in the midst of amazing fireworks displays.

“You’ll stand on line like everybody else,” Yaseen later told me. “And you’ll wait your turn.”

Any rapport that had existed between Yaseen and me was gone. He couldn’t stand me; I detested him. He was always after me, interrupting me when I tried to get a word in edgewise, rejecting my efforts to make myself useful. Our hostility made life miserable for the other members of our group, and things promised to get worse. Yaseen was trying to break me, trying to make me toe the line. I was no hothead; I never challenged his authority or his charisma. I simply hated him, and he took the contempt he aroused in me for insubordination.

Sayed eventually faced the obvious facts. My cohabitation with Yaseen was at risk of ending badly and endangering the entire group. Sayed authorized me to come back to his store, and I returned in haste to my little upstairs room. Omar’s ghost joined me there; now he had me all to himself. Nevertheless, I preferred the worst of his pestering to the mere sight of Yaseen.

It was after closing time on a Wednesday. I had dinner at the greasy spoon nearby and walked back to the store. The sun was going down in flames behind the buildings of the city. Sayed was waiting for me in the doorway, his eyes glittering in the obscurity. He was extremely excited.

We went up to my room. Once we were inside, he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Today I received the best news of my life.”

His face was radiant as he hugged me to him, and then his happiness burst out. “It’s fantastic, cousin. Fantastic.”

He asked me to sit on the bed, made an effort to control his enthusiasm, and finally said, “I spoke to you about a mission. You wanted to see some action, and I told you maybe I had something for you, but I wanted to wait and be sure about it. Well, the miracle has taken place. I received the confirmation less than an hour ago. This incredible mission is now possible. Do you feel capable of accomplishing it?”

“I’ll say I do.”

“We’re talking about the most important mission ever undertaken in history. The final mission. The mission that will bring about the unconditional capitulation of the West and return us permanently to our proper role on the world’s stage. Do you believe you could—”

“I’m ready, Sayed. My life’s at your disposal.”

“It’s not only a question of your life. People die every day — my life doesn’t belong to me, either. But this is a crucial mission. It will require total, unfailing commitment.”

“Are you starting to have doubts about me?”

“I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I were.”

“So where’s the problem?”

“You’re free to refuse. I don’t want to pressure you in any way.”

“Nobody’s pressuring me. I accept the mission. Unconditionally.”

“I appreciate your determination, cousin. For what it’s worth, you have my entire confidence. I’ve been observing you ever since you first came into the store. Every time I lay eyes on you, I feel a kind of levitation; I take off…. Yet it was a difficult choice. There’s no lack of candidates. But it means a lot to me that the chosen one is a boy from my hometown. Kafr Karam, the forgotten, will take its place in history,” he concluded. Then he took me in his arms and kissed me on the forehead.

He had lifted me up into the ranks of those who are revered. That night, I dreamed about Omar again. But I didn’t run away from him.

Sayed came back to sound me out once more. He wanted to be sure I hadn’t spoken too soon. The day before launching the preparations for the mission, he told me, “I’ll give you three more days. Think hard. At the end of that time, we’re off.”

“I’ve already thought hard. Now I want to act.”

Sayed assigned me to a small but luxurious apartment with a view of the Tigris. The first time I went to the place, a photographer was waiting there for me. After the photo session, a barber cut my hair, and then I took a shower. As I was to leave Baghdad within a week, I went out to the post office to send Bahia the money I’d managed to put aside.

On a Friday, after the Great Prayer, I left Baghdad in a livestock truck driven by an old peasant in a turban. I was supposed to be his nephew and his shepherd. My new papers were in order and looked properly worn. My name appeared on various documents connected to the livestock business. We negotiated the roadblocks without difficulty and reached Ar Ramadi before nightfall. Sayed was waiting for us at a farm about twenty kilometers west of the town. He made sure that everything had gone well, ate dinner with us, and gave us the itinerary for the next stage before taking his leave. At dawn the following day, we were back on the road, bound for a little village on the slopes of the Badiet esh Sham, the plateau of the Syrian desert. There, another driver took me aboard his van. He and I spent the night in a small town and drove away before sunrise, heading for Ar Rutbah, not far from the Jordanian border. Sayed, who was already there, welcomed us in the courtyard of a health clinic. A physician in a graying lab coat invited us to wash up and occupy one of the patients’ rooms. Our departure from the clinic was canceled on each of the following three days because of a military redeployment in the region. On the fourth day, taking advantage of a sandstorm, the driver and I set out for Jordan. Visibility was zero, but my companion drove calmly along, following desert trails he seemed to know with his eyes closed. After several hours of absorbing shocks and inhaling sand, we made a stop on the slopes of a valley, a barren place where the wind howled unceasingly. We drove onto a natural courtyard and took refuge in a cave. We had a bite to eat, and then the driver, a small, dried-up, impenetrable fellow, climbed to the top of a ridge. I saw him take out his cell phone and, apparently with the help of some sort of navigation device, indicate our coordinates. When he came back, he declared, “I won’t have to sleep outdoors tonight.” That was the only time he ever addressed a word to me. He entered the cave, lay down, and pretended he wasn’t there.

The sandstorm began to subside, its surges coming at longer and longer intervals. The wind still sang in the crevices, but as the landscape steadily emerged from the ocher fog of the desert, the gusts gradually died down and then suddenly fell silent altogether.

The sun burned more brightly as it touched the rim of the earth, throwing the bare, jagged hills on the horizon into bold relief. Out of nowhere, two men riding mules appeared, climbing up the valley to our cave. Later, I would learn that they belonged to a ring of former smugglers who had turned to gunrunning and occasionally served as guides for the volunteers arriving from other countries to swell the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. My driver complimented them on their punctuality, inquired about the current operational situation in the sector, and turned me over to them. Without any sort of farewell, he returned to his vehicle and sped away.